Car Culture

Earlier this week, Korean car brand Kia updated its logo. Don’t worry, it still spells out “Kia”, it’s just in a slightly newer and funkier font — but it got us thinking: how easy is it to recognize car company logos, or even tell them apart?

KITT might be the most famous Pontiac ever made — it’s certainly GTPlanet readers’ favorite ever television car — and now you have the chance to own it. We’re not talking about any old KITT either, but David Hasselhoff’s own personal car.

This is a trip report from February 2020, before the global lockdowns began.

If there’s one thing that motorsport history has shown us, it’s that anything can be a race car. A phrase often used is that the first race happened when someone built the second car, and that’s something Peugeot really took to heart in 1995.

You might remember a little while back that Tom Brooks, the Voice of Gran Turismo Sport, was starting out on a motorsport career. Tom, who not only provides the narration for many of the in-game videos but also acts as the presenter of the Gran Turismo live events, wanted to get racing himself and set out to combine that with his natural talent for talking about it for a video series on Youtube.

2020 marks an important milestone. It is 100 years since Jujiro Matsuda founded a company in Hiroshima, Japan, that would eventually become the Mazda Motor Corporation.

Aston Martin has revealed its AMR-C01, a driving rig created by the brand and technical partner Curv Racing Simulators.

You may recall earlier in the year that Ford wanted help from the gaming community. The brand, through its Team Fordzilla esports team, asked gamers to help it put together a design for a new car.

British luxury sports brand Bentley is offering up an unusually inexpensive brand-new car. For two-thirds the price of a Chevrolet Spark — or the same money as a Dacia Sandero, for our European readers — you can pick up a shiny, new Bentley Continental GT.

BMW Motorsport has launched a livery creation competition with a difference. The winning design will become available as a selectable livery in iRacing, but also appear on a real-world race car in the 2020 DTM championship finale.

You’ll need a very different kind of driving license if you want to take Lamborghini’s latest offering out for a spin. Officially going by the name of “Tecnomar for Lamborghini 63”, this new beast — unveiled today some 75 miles from the brand’s home — is a bit of a boat. In fact it’s a lot of a boat: it’s a high-performance yacht.

Renowned Toyota racing outfit Tom’s has set up a rather unusual crowd-funding appeal. The goal? To fund a complete rebuild of one of its most famous cars which was recently rediscovered rusting away in a random Japanese warehouse.

If you’re after one of the 63 Lamborghini Sian FKP 37 models, but can neither afford the price nor the wait for Sant’Agata to actually start building them, there’s a piece of good news for you from Denmark.

Famed niche German car manufacturer Ruf has released a new documentary film covering its 80-year history. The “Love at the Red Line” film tells the rather unusual story of the Ruf family business’s origins under Alois Ruf, with extensive interviews with current company owners Alois Ruf Jr and his wife Estonia.

Gran Turismo’s ‘Vision Gran Turismo’ project has provided us with many weird and wonderful cars. Since the scheme first started, back with 2013’s Gran Turismo 6, we’ve seen automotive brands clamor to have their concept cars included. Some have even come back for a second attempt and, it turns out, Bugatti was one of those brands.

A gang of car thieves in New Zealand have staged a brazen car heist of a barely believable magnitude. Apparently working in teams, the crew made off with almost 100 vehicles over the course of a long weekend.

Subaru has given us a glimpse into one possible Gran Turismo future with an unusual promotional video. The clip is part of the worldwide “Stay Home” message campaign, and features Subaru factory GT300 driver Takuto Iguchi playing a racing game that looks quite like GT Sport — at least on the surface.

It’s official. After 5,000 votes cast across the past month, GTPlanet’s users and social media followers have decided that the greatest ever TV car is a Pontiac.

When racing games become a serious hobby there’s all manner of equipment you can buy to enhance your experience and ability. There’s fancy wheels and pedals, games-oriented displays, and driving rigs to which you can mount them all.

Although it didn’t top our staff poll for best Gran Turismo game, GT4 is nonetheless among the best — and best-remembered. Like GT2, its large and wild car list introduced the world to all sorts of bizarre machines that hadn’t twitched the needle beyond their own circles.